The finger points 1931 - Depression era gangster story with a dominating Gable

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IMDB rating: 6,1

Director: John Francis Dillon
Main Cast: Richard Barthelmess, Fay Wray, Regis Toomey, Robert Elliott, Clark Gable, Oscar Apfel

"The names have all been changed, but this hard-hitting gangster tale is based on an actual newspaper headline story involving the brutal slaying of corrupt crime reporter Alfred 'Jake' Lingle, who had been suspected of betraying his boss Al Capone. Naive Southern boy Breckinridge Lee comes to the big city for fame and fortune. He starts out honest, but is unable to the resist hefty payoffs offered by crime lord Louis Blanco to suppress certain stories. Time passes and Lee does a great job for Blanco. Lee's girl friend tries to get him to go straight, but he has become too accustomed to the money and besides is too deeply mired in corruption to ever escape. In the end, he loses his life when a story about Blanco's latest shenanigans escapes his watchful eye and gets printed. Believing Lee was behind the double-cross, Blanco orders him executed and tragedy ensues.
After talkies came in, Warner Brothers didn't really seem to know what to do with Richard Barthelmess, but he hung around in starring roles quite a bit longer than most of his silent counterparts - from 1929 to 1934. Of course, most notable here is Clark Gable, sitting in the palm of Jack Warner's hand, and not being recognized by him as a star in the making. Gable is impressive here as a spats-wearing charming sinner, the gangster who sees Lee as a useful idiot - for awhile anyways." - www.allmovie.com

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The Finger Points 1931 Mp4

The last flight 1931 - One of the finest films ever made about the Lost Generation

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022054/?ref_=nv_sr_1
IMDB rating: 7,9

Director: William Dieterle
Main Cast: Richard Barthelmess, David Manners, Johnny Mack Brown, Helen Chandler, Elliott Nugent

"The war is over but a new struggle begins for former World War I flyboys Cary Lockwood (Richard Barthelmess) and his three friends. They are all shell-shocked by their combat experiences and ill-fitted for a world of workaday responsibility. For them, the night life of Paris is an irresistible siren's call. Then comes the allure of Lisbon with its passion and bullfighting. Then may come the tragic result of the quartet's inability to rediscover the selves the war took from them.
This exceptional film is the work of writer John Monk Saunders and, more surprisingly, director William Dieterle. It's a penetrating, incisive work that manages to be both bleak and nihilistic without becoming pretentious or enervating. While a heavy sense of melancholy hangs over the film, tinged with an undercurrent of despair, Flight never becomes labored. Its characters are souls that are weighted down and, for most of them, on an inexorable march toward destruction, but their unconscious fascination with a Death Wish doesn't force the film to become an ordeal. Instead, one cares deeply about these people, mourns even as they reach their expected ends, and feels triumphant at the implied relative happiness that awaits those who manage to survive the dark nights of their own souls. Dieterle directs with extreme sensitivity and taste; it's far and away his best work and makes one wish he had created more works in a similar vein. The cast is all good, with special mention going to Helen Chandler's Nikki."

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The dawn patrol or The flight commander 1930 - Early talkie Top Gun

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020815/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
IMDB rating: 8,1

Director: Howard Hawks
Main Cast: Richard Barthelmess, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Neil Hamilton, Frank McHugh

"Howard Hawks' 1930 film The Dawn Patrol (retitled Flight Commnander because of the 1938 remake) plays remarkably well in the twenty-first century, considering its age. As with most movies made at the dawn of the sound era, the camera work is a bit static at times, and some theatrical artificiality creeps into the performances - there are moments where the viewer rightfully feels as though they're watching a silent movie, with just a bit too much visual emoting. But despite a few creaky joints, the film never loses its forward momentum, and Hawks makes good use of the available camera movement as well as music - specifically as source music, to excellent dramatic effect, and this would have been a new feature in movies of the era that holds up well eight decades later. There are still inter-titles to explain scene changes, and a few other artifacts of the period, but otherwise this version of The Dawn Patrol stands fairly well next to its remake - Neil Hamilton is fine as the harried commander of a Royal Flying Corp squadron during the middle of World War I, and Richard Barthlemess gives a good performance as his friend-turned-nemesis, the top pilot in the squadron but also his harshest critic. On them, with some help from Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as Barthlemess's best friend, rests most of this drama, and that drama, despite its age, is still compelling. Where this film does differ somewhat from the remake is its relative brevity - 82 minutes versus 103 - and also a tighter focus on the grimness of the story. Owing to differences in the script and their approaches to acting, Barthlemess's Courtney shows little of the devil-may-care spirit with which Errol Flynn (being Errol Flynn) couldn't help but imbue his character with in the remake. There are some moments of comedy, and out-and-out joy, but as a product of 1930 as opposed to 1938, eight years closer to what most adults regarded as a shattering event, the overall tone of this picture is, understandably, more thoroughly earnest. Indeed, not even James Finlayson - best remembered across the four subsequent generations for his comedy work in association with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy - is totally believable to modern audiences as a tough ground crew sergeant, without the picture losing a beat of its message and atmosphere." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/the-dawn-patrol-v88836/

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